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Rachel Joffe Falmagne

Rachel Joffe Falmagne

Rachel Joffe Falmagne is Professor of Psychology and past Director of Women’s Studies at Clark University, as well as past President of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology. Her interests include feminist theory, critical psychology, feminist philosophical perspectives on epistemology, and methodological and epistemological issues for the social sciences. She has discussed how gender as a social formation, in its intersection with social formations such as “race” and class, structures the social order at all levels of social organization, materially, discursively, symbolically, institutionally and psychologically. She has published on the complexly gendered foundations of thought, culture and development, on the material, discursive and agentive constituents of “self” and “mind,” on the intersectional politics of knowledge production, on critical appraisals of developmental and cognitive psychology, on the dialectic of critique, theory and method, on the dialectic of the particular and the general in qualitative research, and on the transdisciplinary feminist study of thought and personal epistemology. Books include Mind and Social Practice: Selected Writings by Sylvia Scribner (with Ethel Tobach and Mary Parlee) and Representing Reason: Feminist Theory and Formal Logic (with Marjorie Hass).

Current Projects

My project explores how a person’s intellectual style may be related to her affective makeup and emotional dynamics within her biographical history and larger processes of social constitution. I will examine examples from my own research and case studies in the feminist literature, and conduct pilot interviews to develop the methodology for research on biographical links between affect and thought.